The Green Reich

originally posted here, by Peter Crawford

This striving toward connectedness with the totality of life, with nature itself, a nature into which we are born, this is the deepest meaning and the true essence of National Socialist thought.

-Professor Ernst Lehmann

Germany is not only the birthplace of the science of ecology and the place where ecological politics’ rose to prominence; it has also been home to a peculiar synthesis of naturalism and nationalism forged under the influence of the Romantic tradition’s anti-Enlightenment philosophy. Two nineteenth century figures exemplify this conjunction: Ernst Moritz Arndt and Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl.

Ernst Moritz Arndt (26 December 1769 – 29 January 1860) was a German patriotic author and poet. Early in his life, he fought for the abolition of serfdom, later against Napoleonic dominance over Germany, and had to flee to Sweden for some time due to his anti-French positions. He is one of the main founders of German nationalism and the movement for German unification. After the Carlsbad Decrees, the forces of the restoration counted him as a demagogue and he was only rehabilitated in 1840. Arndt played an important role for the early national and liberal Burschenschaft movement and for the unification movement, and his song “Was ist des Deutschen Vaterland?” acted as an unofficial German national anthem.

Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl (6 May 1823 – 16 November 1897) was a German journalist, novelist and folklorist. Riehl was born in Biebrich in the Duchy of Nassau and died in Munich. Riehl’s writings became normative for a large body of Volkish thought. He constructed a more completely integrated Volkish view of man and society as they related to nature, history, and landscape. He was the writer of the famous ‘Land und Leute’ (Places and People), written in 1857-63, which discussed the organic nature of a Volk which he claimed could only be attained if it fused with the native landscape.

He rejected all artificiality and defined modernity as a nature contrived by man and thus devoid of that genuineness to which living nature alone gives meaning. Riehl pointed to the newly developing urban centres as the cause of social unrest. For many Volkish thinkers, only nature was genuine. He desired a hierarchical society that patterned after the medieval estates. In ‘Die bürgerliche Gesellschaft’ (Bourgeois Society) he accused those of Capitalist interest of disturbing ancient customs and thus destroying the historicity of the Volk. Animosity towards the city was an integral part of the rise of Volkish thought. At times it was expressed in the slogan “Berlin is the domain of the Jews” or in the remark by another writer that “cities are the tombs of Germanism” Such ideas secured a place for Riehl in the history of Volkish thought. 

Riehl, born into a settled middle-class background, was a professor at the University of Munich. Riehl’s 1853 essay ‘Feld und Wald’ (Field and Forest) ended with a call to fight for “the rights of wilderness.” But even here nationalist pathos set the tone: “We must save the forest, not only so that our ovens do not become cold in winter, but also so that the pulse of life of the people continues to beat warm and joyfully, so that Germany remains German.”

Riehl was an implacable opponent of the rise of industrialism and urbanization; his overtly anti-semitic glorification of rural peasant values, and undifferentiated condemnation of modernity established him as the “founder of agrarian romanticism and anti-urbanism.” These latter two fixations matured in the second half of the nineteenth century in the context of the Volkish movement, a powerful cultural disposition and social tendency which united ethnocentric populism with ‘nature mysticism‘.

At the heart of the Volkish weltanschauung was a negative response to modernity. In the face of the very real dislocations brought on by the triumph of industrial capitalism and national unification, Volkish thinkers preached a return to the land, to the simplicity and wholeness of a life attuned to nature’s purity.

The movement aspired to reconstruct the society that was sanctioned by history, rooted in nature, and in communion with the cosmic life spirit. The emergence of modern ecology forged the final link in the chain which bound together nationalism, mystically charged racism, and environmentalist predilections.